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A Debian user has recently discovered that systemd prevents the skipping of fsck while booting:
With init, skipping a scheduled fsck during boot was easy, you just pressed Ctrl+c, it was obvious! Today I was late for an online conference. I got home, turned on my computer, and systemd decided it was time to run fsck on my 1TB hard drive. Ok, I just skip it, right? Well, Ctrl+c does not work, ESC does not work, nothing seems to work. I Googled for an answer on my phone but nothing. So, is there a mysterious set of commands they came up with to skip an fsck or is it yet another flaw?
One user chimed in with a hack to work around the flaw, but it involved specifying an argument on the kernel command line. Another user described this so-called "fix" as being "Pretty damn inconvenient and un-discoverable", while yet another pointed out that the "fix" merely prevents "systemd from running fsck in the first place", and it "does not let you cancel a systemd-initiated boot-time fsck which is already in progress."
Further investigation showed that this is a known bug with systemd that was first reported in mid-2011, and remains unfixed as of late December 2014. At least one other user has also fallen victim to this bug.
How could a severe bug of this nature even happen in the first place? How can it remain unfixed over three years after it was first reported?
(Score: 4, Informative) by Marand on Sunday December 21 2014, @05:23AM
However, this is a site I want to come to to read news, not to have a daily 2 minutes of hate against that which does not share my ideological beliefs.
I actually found this one to be informative and useful for me. I expected another useless flamebait summary, but instead got informed of a potential gotcha with systemd as init. Reading the linked bug report thread, including its followups, also taught me that systemd also likes to disable magic sysrq keys [wikipedia.org].
Redhat considers this NOTABUG [redhat.com], Mageia did too but bowed to pressure and re-enabled it [mageia.org], and Debian decided it wasn't systemd's place to change this and re-enabled sysrq [debian.org].
Thanks to this article, I learned about two systemd gotchas I need to remember when dealing with systemd-enabled machines. The sysrq one is especially a big deal, because the times you need the sysreq keys, things are already too hosed to play with trying to enable them. It's not something you need often, but you expect it to work when you do. I saved a laptop from a reboot earlier today using sysrq-k on Xorg, in fact. I would have been pissed if my init had one day decided I'm not adult enough to use them and forced me to cut power instead.
So, while I agree that we had a pretty bad string of AC systemd troll submissions before, this particular submission has merit, because it's actually providing a link to some useful info I (and likely others) wouldn't have known about otherwise. This is something the systemd users may want to know, and in fact, it's probably more useful to them than to systemd haters.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Sunday December 21 2014, @05:36AM
I should also add, now that I've read father in the chain, that this doesn't affect only fsck. According to another message [debian.org], you can't break out of anything that hangs or takes an excessively long time to start with ^C during bootup, so it's definitely an important gotcha to be aware of.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 21 2014, @09:54AM
You want a rant? I've got that.
Running jessie on my laptop, figured I'd give the thing a fair shot and learn about it on a non critical system long before considering migrating the servers a couple months after the stable release as we usually do.
I run into new breakage every day, be it trying to hijack ifconfig with race condition fun, acpi shutdown now borked, and sleep mode totally unavailable since an update a couple weeks ago. The half baked bugs I can deal with, there's still time in the oven. The restrictive design choices hurt so bad since they are anathema to why we use a highly-configurable (read: tunable) OS in the first place. Debian needs a Mint edition to fix this, but the third party repos negate a number of the major advantages of using Debian Stable in the first place. OpenBSD is calling but no one wants to deal with the upheaval and retooling. This is not how I want to spend my time guys.
--angry customer and soon to be former DD after a decade and a half of faithful service to the project.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday December 21 2014, @07:52PM
If you don't want to run testing and have to put up with the problems that it will throw up, why don't you just stick with Wheezy for another 18 months and see how things pan out? I'm not trolling, I simply cannot understand why you would chose Jessie knowing that it hasn't even been released yet and that the release will probably throw up a whole load of problems which will need sorting out before it is ready for prime-time.
(Score: 1) by Arik on Sunday December 21 2014, @09:13PM
It's irrational as all heck but still a powerful lot of people are emotionally invested in constantly having and using the newest $whatever. They WANT their computer constantly running out and downloading and installing new stuff all the time without intervention.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 22 2014, @12:46AM
And what does he do after those 18 months are up? Does he just stop installing security updates, and let his systems become progressively more vulnerable? Does he just stop using his computers completely? This "keep using Wheezy" crap is just that: complete crap! It's just delaying an eventual disaster slightly. The disaster is still going to come. It doesn't prevent it at all. It doesn't even mitigate it.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Monday December 22 2014, @08:34AM
Well, try thinking a bit differently....
After 18 months, perhaps all these problems will have been resolved and, who knows, perhaps systemd will have even been dropped. If you don't have to change your system today - don't change it!
You have 18 months to see what the community decides is a better path and join in the one that most suits you. You have 18 months to find one of the 20+ other distros that are not using systemd. (No - do your own homework - or even try reading other stories here where they are listed). You have 18 months to learn how to switch Jessie from systemd to sysvinit - 10 minutes work at most. You have 18 months to learn about how your computer works and to find the solution that gives you exactly what you want. You even have 18 months to save up for a Window's licence - but I don't think that it is a good use of your time or your money. Essentially, if we are talking about a home computer - even one being used professionally at home - then there is no reason to upgrade today to something that you know does not work. If you are supporting other computers then you have 18 months to plan a sensible upgrade path and find alternative solutions.
Again, I reiterate, nobody is forcing anyone to upgrade to systemd for a considerable period of time. Why on earth are people panicking about systemd now? It's a pile of crap - but so is a lot of software. Just don't use it.